May 9 (UPI) — The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would add a citizenship question to the next U.S. Census in 2030, preventing non-citizens or illegal immigrants from being counted toward the allocation of representatives and federal electors in each state.
The Equal Representation Act passed the House by a vote of 206 to 202, along party lines. It now moves to the Senate.
Rep. Chuck Edwards, R-N.C., who introduced the bill in January, called it “commonsense” that only U.S. citizens be counted when it comes to representation. Currently, anyone who participates in the census every 10 years — including non-citizens and undocumented immigrants — is counted for redistricting.
“One of the lesser acknowledged, but equally alarming, side effects of this administration’s failure to secure the southern border is the illegal immigrant population’s influence in America’s electoral process,” Edwards said on the House floor Wednesday.
“Though commonsense dictates that only citizens should be counted for apportionment purposes, illegal aliens have nonetheless recently been counted toward the final tallies that determine how many House seats each state is allocated and the number of electoral votes it will wield in presidential elections,” Edwards added.
The White House has been “strongly opposed” to putting a citizenship question on the census, saying it would be too costly.
“The bill would increase the cost of conducting the census and make it more difficult to obtain accurate data,” the White House’s Office of Management and Budget said in a statement this week.
“It would also violate the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which requires that the number of seats in the House of Representatives ‘be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state,'” the White House added.
“It is unconscionable that illegal immigrants and non-citizens are counted toward congressional district apportionment and our electoral map,” said Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn.
“While people continue to flee Democrat-run cities, desperate Democrats are back-filling the mass exodus with illegal immigrants so that they do not lose their seats in Congress or their electoral votes for the presidency, hence artificially boosting their political power and in turn diluting the power of Americans’ votes.”
Before Wednesday’s vote, Democrats blasted the effort as unconstitutional and a waste of time given its prospects in the Senate.
“This bill is an affront to the great radical Republicans who wrote the original Constitution and the 14the Amendment, which has always made persons, not voters, the basis for reapportionment,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. “This bill would destroy the accuracy of the census, which may have something to do with its real legislative motivation.”
